Deanza College Fashion and Music Target Consumer Audience Articles Questions Please answer each of the following questions, drawing from the readings where

Deanza College Fashion and Music Target Consumer Audience Articles Questions Please answer each of the following questions, drawing from the readings where applicable. Responses to each question should be a minimum of 100 words.
How does Hebdige explain the concepts of “(un)fashion” and “confrontation dressing? What are the motivations, according to Hebdige, behind these stylistic choices?

According to Lewis, who did MTV identify as their target consumer audience? What kinds of people/identities ended up being excluded from this target audience and why? Can you think of any currently popular parallels to MTV, and who might their target audiences be (or not be)?

What are some of the musical and textual characteristics of “I Will Survive” that Hubbs links to its themes of marginalization and transcendence? How does she argue that these characteristics demonstrate disco’s black, Latino/a and queer roots? 273
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‘I Will Survive’: Musical Mappings of Queer Social Space in a Disco Anthem
Author(s): Nadine Hubbs
Source: Popular Music, Vol. 26, No. 2 (May, 2007), pp. 231-244
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4500315
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Popular Music (2007) Volume 26/2. Copyright ? 2007 Cambridge University Press, pp. 231-244
doi:10.1017/S0261143007001250 Printed in the United Kingdom
‘I Will Survive’: musical
mappings of queer social spa
in a disco anthem
NADINE HUBBS
U-M Women’s Studies Program, 2229 Lane Hall, 204 S. State St, Ann Arbor, M
E-mail: nhubbs@umich.edu
Abstract
This essay reconsiders the constituencies of fans and detractors present at prime and burstin
1970s dicsos. It argues for a more gender-inclusive conception of discos multiracial ‘gay’ reveller
and for a particular convoluted conception of ‘homophobia’ as this applies to the Middle-American
youths who raged against disco in midsummer 1979. Their historic eruption at Chicago
Comiskey Park came just weeks after the chart reign of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’, toda
a classic emblem of gay culture in the post-Stonewall and AIDS eras and arguably disco’s greates
anthem. Disco inspired lovers and haters, too, among music critics. Critical adulation and vitrio
are conjoined in the present reading of musical rhetoric, which explores disco’s celebrated powe
to induce rapture in devotees at the social margins while granting anti-disco critics’ charge of
inexpressivity in its vocals. In ‘Survive’ musical expressivity is relocated in the high-production
instrumentals, where troping of learned and vernacular, European and Pan-American, sacred an
profane timbres and idioms defines a euphoric space of difference and transcendence. The use o
minor mode for triumphant purposes is also a striking marker of difference in ‘Survive’ and i
among the factors at work in the song’s prodigious afterlife.
On 12 July 1979 the Chicago White Sox hosted the Detroit Tigers in a double header at
Comiskey Park. Also scheduled was a promotional event for the Chicago album
oriented rock (AOR) station WLUP ‘The Loop’, led by a young disc jockey named
Steve Dahl. Against the chant of some 90,000 present – ‘Disco sucks!’ – Dahl towed a
dumpster-load of disco records onto centre field and detonated it. A mob of young
white males stormed the field, torching records and wreaking mayhem. Among th
displays of anti-disco backlash in the late Carter-early Reagan years, including
incarnations of the ‘Disco sucks’ motto as bumper-sticker slogan, punk song,
and tee-shirt inscription, that day’s near-riot in the heartland stands as the most
menacingly emblematic.1
Such a violent reaction must seem impossibly disproportionate to its object, if
that object is taken to be nothing more than a style of popular music. But there was
more at work and at stake than such a surface-bound reading can admit. The cultural
crusaders of Comiskey were defending not just themselves but society from th
encroachment of the racial other, of ‘foreign’ values, and of ‘disco fags’ – symbolised
Hollywood-style in the bodily and dramatic extravagances of John Travolta’s Saturda
Night Fever (1977) protagonist Tony Manero, whose marked ethnicity and Qiana
swathed chic was counterbalanced by conspicuous whiteness and heterosexuality.2
231
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232 Nadine Hubbs
By now various writers have retrospectively located disco’s origins in
black music at gay Manhattan dance clubs (e.g. Cummings 1975; Tucker
1989), and many sources rightly locate both racist and homophobic imp
anti-disco backlash (e.g. Tucker 1986; EMP 2002). But in 1979 the word h
not in general circulation.3 And in 1980 Diana Ross could proclaim ‘I’m
against a disco beat without raising mainstream eyebrows or controv
rose to number five on the pop charts, its double-voiced meaning hidde
a scattering of insiders.4
Thus, in the event, the threats against which the Comiskey Park
surely included such ‘faggotries’ as ballroom dancing, fashion cons
music that used horns, strings and harps.5 Real men ca 1979 found their
arena concerts, adhered to a jeans-and-tee-shirt dress code, and by their
and off-key singing affirmed the redoubtability of their gender and se
We can only imagine the disco inferno in centre field had many of tho
about the real, live faggots, dykes, and others who created and thrill
endless beat.
Phantom attacks: homophobia and the unreal enemy
In the historical scene just sketched I would highlight two points that diverge from
familiar representations. First, I regard disco as a musical, social, and cultural spac
with critical African-American, Latino/a, and variously queer involvements. The
customary naming of gay men in this last slot perpetuates an effacement of queer
women in male-centred narrations of ‘gay’ history, and of dance-clubbing quee
persons of other configurations of sex, gender identity, and object choice. Historica
accounts locate disco’s origins in Manhattan clubs whose clientele were Africa
American and Latino, and gay – meaning: gay men. But we need to extend ou
perspective on disco beyond the instant and place of its birth – beyond New York,
beyond that moment ca 1969-1970 and the handful of dance clubs in which DJs firs
spun mixes now identifiable as disco or proto-disco. Outside Manhattan, in large,
medium-sized, and small cities across the US, many gay bars and clubs of the era wer
gender- and sex-integrated. And their male and female clientele alike often called
themselves ‘gay’ with no thought that the term applied more to one sex than another
Gay men and lesbians, drag queens and ‘fag hags’ were all part of the 1970s-1980s
disco scene in countless queer locales, whether or not at disco’s New York debut.7
Second, in pointing to the presence of homophobia in the anti-disco backlash, I
expressly am not using ‘homophobia’ as simply equivalent to ‘fear of known homosexual persons’ in the disco world. Certainly this is one meaning I intend to invoke
here. But I would cast a broader definition of ‘homophobia’ so as to capture also th
far greater phenomenon of fear and loathing towards any perceived aura of homo
sexuality (often figured as gender crossing) in a culture in which knowledge of actua
homosexuals and homosexuality was taboo, avoided and denied. Thus I view disco as
a musical and social phenomenon situated within the overarching twentieth-century
Anglo-American condition of ‘homosexual panic’ theorised by Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick (1985, pp. 88-9 etc.; 1990, pp. 184-8 esp.).
In Sedgwick’s formulation, the establishment of proper masculine heterosexual
subjectivity simultaneously requires and stigmatises male homosocial bonds, whose
rules of engagement are shifting, arbitrary, and often self-contradictory. Only men
who successfully navigate the brutalities of this double-binding path may claim the
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‘I Will Survive’ 233
privileges of material, power and knowledge that constitute masculin
Meanwhile, the threat of the unsuccessful alternative motivates consid
and many violent eruptions. And it motivates a great deal more: In m
chy, a cultural system structured by relations of exchange between m
tives of male homo/heterosexual definition regulate definition, repr
knowledge of every kind, and thus give rise to an ‘epistemology of th
Sedgwick’s theory can lend support to my assertion that homopho
disco in the 1970s and 1980s was often focused on the mere (attr
homosexuality: The culture of homosexual panic rendered its actu
taboo as to be irrelevant, if not irreal. Under a regime in which m
relations are ‘at once the most compulsory and the most prohibited of
Sedgwick (1990, pp. 186-7) notes, ‘self-ignorance [is] constitutively en
possess knowledge about homosexuality is itself suspicious. Thus,
secrecy in the modern social and sexual economy is ‘not to concea
much as to conceal knowledge of the knowledge’ (Miller 1988, p. 2
shouldn’t be surprised that homophobia in Anglo-American mod
quently manifested itself not only in explicit anti-homosexual stateme
in violent attacks on a homosexuality evoked subliminally, as phanto
anism is illustrated vividly throughout Vito Russo’s (1987) analyses of
century Hollywood cinema: In one instance after another, implici
relationships and characters are killed off in horrific fashion. But ev
extinguishment these unfortunate creatures smoulder. What precedes
deaths is something less than real life.
In our twenty-first-century present, homophobia is often overt a
queer persons who are granted realness, their actual existence explici
edged – as the current US battle over gay marriage illustrates. We m
summon a historicising perspective to apprehend the homophobia in
ca’s anti-disco furore ca 1979, for homophobia in this context was fre
through assaults on queerness that simultaneously denied queer exist
perspective can help us understand and appreciate the role of twe
queer subcultural space, including that of disco: It served not just to p
safety and acceptance, but crucially to confirm queer persons’ very e
intact survival in a world that would make of them, if not monsters
ghosts, nonentities.9
Transcendence in A-minor: the musical rhetoric of difference in
‘Survive’
The historical context just outlined grounds the analytic frame into which I w
my consideration of Gloria Gaynor’s disco anthem ‘I Will Survive’. Released
the song attained platinum-single status, pinning the No. 1 spot on the pop
from 20 January through 25 May 1979 in the weeks leading up to South Ch
anti-disco tumult. But the track enjoyed even greater success in club rotatio
endures still as a queer dance classic. In my reading, ‘Survive’ stands as the ar
emblem of disco as a musico-social movement born of and bespeaking
subcultural mingling in the margins. I hear in the song a rich interplay of mu
verbal discourses of difference, yielding a pop-cultural trope whose residual
otherness were perceptible in the following ways: (i) they could elude appre
and thus ‘pass’ in mainstream culture, or (ii) they could be apprehended, and
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234 Nadine Hubbs
A
8
Am
A
-7
Dm
G
A
6
C
F
A
5
BW
A
#7
Esus4
E
//// //// //// //// //// //// //// ////
i iv WVII III WVI ii”7 V4
Figure 1. ‘I Will survive’ (Fekaris-Perren): basic vocal m
provoke disfavour, fear and loathing, on behal
inspire identification on the basis of experienc
Vis-a-vis this last possibility, (ii)(b): from a
and lyrics of ‘I Will Survive’, particularly give
the Comiskey Park fracas, already resonate be
depicts, in the first person, one woman’s exp
eventual hard-won transcendence. Vis-a-vis
music’s mysterious, often subliminal, seeming
special potency to attach to musical markers
potently threatening or potently cathartic, de
A host of musical signifiers in ‘Survive’ serv
reinforce its textual thematics of marginalisati
to greet the listener is the song’s high-drama
sweeping, Liberace-esque piano arpeggio, u
dominant-seven-flat-nine chord. The singer t
recitative accompaniment from the rhythm se
melody over the eight-bar A-minor falling-fifth
that will repeat throughout (see the Figure).”1
the song’s form – which proceeds gradually
traction of instrumental layers, and so exemp
Spicer 2004). Rhetorically, the ostinato, in its
evokes the Baroque lament. All these features
‘Survive’ musically asserts difference from it
conversance with imported and ‘exotic’ musica
stanza, the slow intro shifts to an upbeat groov
is abandoned for a denser mix: the dance track
I mentioned the use of minor mode in ‘Sur
semantically marked as the ‘sad’ mode and, in
tive major, the ‘other’ mode. A shift from minor
a move from tragedy to transcendence – as ex
Symphony, with its journey from C-minor de
mode usage in 1970s album-oriented rock is lar
arises in slow-tempo tender or tragic love ball
1973), for example – and in slow-to-mid-temp
‘Stairway to Heaven’ (1971) and Aerosmith’s ‘D
danceable AOR anthems are typically in major
Trick’s ‘I Want You to Want Me’ (No. 7, 197
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‘I Will Survive’ 235
throughout the latter half of that Comiskey summer, The Knack
(arguably in C, though it spends much of its time on a G-blues riff s
sexual tension). A list of representative songs from earlier in the dec
Thin Lizzy’s ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ (No. 12,1976), the Stones’ ‘I
Roll’ (No. 16, 1974), and Grand Funk’s ‘We’re an American Band’ (
characteristic rock anthems in major.
Like Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’, ‘Survive’ begins in the realm of
tragedy. The change of tempo at the second stanza corresponds to a shi
lyrics and a new direction in the narrative, leaving tragedy behind.
has gone from abandonment and misery to Signifyin(g) sass, signall
by the line ‘And so you’re back from outer space’ (see below for furth
Signifyin[g] practices). The rest of the song will stay in the up-tempo
ever moving from the minor mode. In thus employing minor, th
differs from contemporary rock anthems of comparable upbeat temp
tone. Interestingly, disco anthems in general very often used the min
the most celebratory instances, like KC and the Sunshine Band’s ‘Sha
(No. 1, 1976), Sylvester’s ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ (No. 36
Weather Girls’ ‘It’s Raining Men’ (1982). All of these songs deploy
scheme in which the verses are in minor, and the euphoric choruses e
sonorities. Minor-ness in ‘Survive’, on the other hand, is unyield
extends disco’s preoccupation with minor mode, while offering narr
tions that the protagonist even in her triumph always carries some m
formative tragedy. Overall, the frequent use of minor in upbea
including ‘I Will Survive’ was a marker of difference in relation to c
AOR, and this difference registered syntactically as well as semantical
instance, as a difference of affect, of feeling-tone.
Another crucial signifier here is vocalism. In her book Hole in Ou
Bayles (1994, p. 281) writes that Gloria Gaynor cannot sing (an
elsewhere levels at Jimi Hendrix, among others). Bayles calls Gay
sighing, yelping, moaning amateur’. She may be simply confused in c
lot among the ‘Love to Love You’ Babies – that is, with Donna Sum
climax queens of disco.12 For in fact Gaynor made no conspicuous en
Bayles calls the ‘orgasmic sound effects’ genre. Still, it seems perfec
somewhat telling, that Bayles wouldn’t like her singing: It’s not Areth
even Mariah’s singing, and in songs like ‘I Will Survive’ it undoubtedly
the vocal traditions of R&B and gospel. Such vocalism has drawn fire
R&B devotees including Bayles and Nelson George, who criticise
of its alleged ‘inflectionless vocals’, ‘metronomelike beat’, and co
dehumanised affect (George 1988, p. 154).
Queer jouissance on the ‘borderline’
Shoulder to shoulder with Bayles’s and George’s statements I wil
Richard Dyer and John Gill, both writing on queer experiences of dis
essay ‘In defence of disco’, Dyer (1979, p. 413) wrote that an “‘es
confines of popular song into ecstasy is very characteristic of disco’
p. 134) more recently exalted disco-dance music as ‘the one form of m
bound up in something that closely resembles Roland Barthes’s notio
that is, rapture, bliss, or transcendence’.
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236 Nadine Hubbs
By constructing a view that embraces both the adulations of Dyer
the vitriol of Bayles and George, I find a coherent basis for interpre
language in ‘I Will Survive’. I have to agree with Bayles (1994, p.
‘leached all the emotion out of the vocals’, at least by the standards of
and R&B styles, with their expressive pitch bending, melisma, an
inflections.13 Although many of disco’s most celebrated vocalists – m
were African-American women – came out of these traditions, and al
musical language is rooted in the fundamentally African-Americ
pop, still it eschews the established rhetoric of emotionalism and
African-American musics.
Bayles and George would end the story here, but the disco jouissance of Dyer an
Gill only begins at this point. Thus in my reading, the affect and passion that find such
brilliant expression in African-American popular idioms are not forsaken in ‘Surviv
Rather, these are relocated in the music, by means of a troping move that als
transforms the emotional palette. In place of the vocal (or vocally conceived) infle
tions and timbral shadings of African-American music, the song’s construction of
sentiment instrumentally invokes timbres and gestures imported from European an
Latin music – specifically that of the cafe, street and carnival. In this regard we hea
for instance, the Latin percussion in ‘Survive’ and likewise its trumpets and
saxophone, which invoke the bright, broadly vibrating timbre characteristic of bot
Gallic torch singer and mariachi brass. The timbres of strings and harp are highbro
Europeanisms and thus here, as in Motown and Philly Soul, bespeak upward
mobility, while the strings’ particular idiom in ‘Survive’ further infuses them with
tragic vernacular elegance redolent of cabaret and tango.
The affective sensibility that issues from this semiotic juncture is distinctly
foreign. Its musical symbols mark it as Latin-Mediterranean and Catholic, but it’s t
Catholicism not so much of the Vatican as of Mardi Gras, less Sunday morning than
Saturday night: the Catholicism not of the Church but of the streets, the little peop
Musical affect here occupies the marked category of the sentimental – a sentimentali
further marked by virtue of its explicitly foreign flavour: adult, worldly and sensua
as compared with the adolescent, naive, and sexually neurotic rock of the tim
indulgent, in-your-face and theatrical, compared with the stoical-else-childlik
Protestant sentimentality that’s channelled through Disney to mainstream America.
The distinctive emotionalism emergent from this minor-mode trope is that of a fran
sentimentality at once tragic and richly celebratory, earthy and embodied, and ulti
mately triumphant, transcendent – but on a human, not monumental, scale: That is
triumph is tethered to a vulnerable humility and candid reckoning of la condition
humaine.14
Analysis of this musical trope in ‘Survive’ can suggest some of the ways in which
disco might have served the identification needs of its amalgamated audience in the
margins, and even become a vehicle for their rapture. Unpacking the language of
‘Survive’ reveals it as a commingling of high and low, art and life, that is neither one
nor another of these: Like Bakhtin’s Rabelaisian carnival it ‘belongs to the borderline
between art and life’ – though while it lasts ‘there is no other life outside it’ (Bakhtin
1984, p. 7). The affective and semantic richness arising from such commingli…
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